Pokémon shop bans adults from buying cards

A shop in Japan which says they are the largest dedicated retailer of Pokémon cards has banned adults from buying their newest releases of trading cards.

As a kid Pokémon was all the rage, there was a cartoon everyone at school watched, any kid who had a GameBoy played the games and pretty much everyone got their hands on at least a pack of the cards at some point.

Times have changed since then, Ash has finally become a Pokémon master, you can catch Pokémon on your phone these days and I'll wager that most people's card collection is either long gone or stored in some attic.

However, that's not the case for everyone as for some adults Pokémon cards are a very serious business, and an incredibly lucrative one to boot.

Some people spend huge amounts of money on buying up the classics while others rake in a fortune auctioning off new packs of cards online.

【商品情報】

1Fにて中学生以下のお客様限定で
パック販売を行っております

各パック当日分がなくなり次第販売終了となります

※おひとり様1日合計10パックまで
※スタッフが年齢確認をさせて頂く場合がございます
※保護者様含むご本人以外の代理購入はご遠慮いただいております pic.twitter.com/kGyWCjc8EF

— 晴れる屋2 (アキバのポケカ専門店/ハレツー) (@hareruya2pokeca) May 1, 2023

While lots of people willing to spend lots of money to buy your stuff is normally good news it can cause problems when the intended target audience can't get in on the action because the grown-ups have taken it all already.

With that in mind the Hareruya 2 store in Tokyo has decided to crack down on adults buying the newest packs of cards by introducing an age-restricted ban.

The store will be conducting ID checks on customers wanting to buy Clay Burst and Snow Hazard booster packs, posting on social media that the packs would only be sold to junior high school students or younger.

On top of that kids will only be allowed to buy up to 10 packs a day so nobody gets to buy the lot and deprive everyone else of their chance.

As well as moving the grown-ups aside so the kids can have a proper go, the move could also help crack down on scalpers and resellers who buy up all the popular stuff before anyone else gets a chance only to sell it off online at a massively inflated price.

Some quotes I’ve seen for Japanese product:

Original 151 - $1700/case
Clayburst - $2400/case
Snow Hazard + Clay Burst - $3600/case

More quotes are coming in, but these are some absurd prices for preorders. Might have to bite the bullet on 151 though 😝 pic.twitter.com/hPOJ0r33Yr

— Pokemon Deals Community (@deals_pokemon) April 13, 2023

According to Kotaku, the store's manager spoke to Japanese news site Livedoor to explain the decision behind carving out a section of the shop which bans adults from buying the cards.

They said: "Many shops exhaust their entire stock as soon as they go on sale, and people active late at night or early in the morning always seem to buy.

"By allocating half our stock for general customers, shops can continue to sell to students and young children. Selling to children not only pleases them, but their parents as well.

"This method of sales enables us to satisfy the greatest number of customers when the items are in such limited supply."

Whatever happened to the simple joys of buying a card and hoping there'd be a shiny Charizard inside, where did we go so wrong?